Google has been playing catch-up in the AI race ever since OpenAI emerged. To try and gain momentum and develop powerful AI models, the tech giant has recently merged its two in-house AI research teams- DeepMind and Google Brain- to form Google DeepMind. This decision was made by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to accelerate Google’s progress in the field of artificial intelligence.
Google Brain and DeepMind have both made notable contributions to AI research in the past few years. For instance, Google Brain created the Transformer architecture in 2017 which is used by most of the advanced large language models in the market, one of which is OpenAI’s GPT-4, a significant roadblock for Google’s AI ambitions. DeepMind has come up with the TensorFlow toolkit for building AI models and AlphaFold which can predict structures of proteins. This merge of DeepMind and Google Brain is expected to bring together the best of both teams and move Google ahead in the AI race.
Sundar Pichai announced the merger on a blog post, mentioning that the combined unit will focus on creating a series of powerful and multi-modal AI models. It is likely that this new unit will be used to create AI models to generate revenue for Google. The tech giant is especially interested in surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-4 and is rumored to be coming up with an AI model called ‘Gemini’ that is said to have a trillion parameters.
Sundar Pichai is an Indian American businessman and the current CEO of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. He has played a significant role in making Google what it is today. Prior to joining Google, he worked at McKinsey & Company and Applied Materials. Pichai is known for his expertise in product management and engineering. He is a recipient of multiple awards and has been named among the ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’ list by TIME magazine.
With the Google DeepMind merger, Google is seemingly well on its way to sustained success in artificial intelligence. The combination of both DeepMind and Google Brain is a match made in heaven and together, it is sure to bring about groundbreaking new models and move Google ahead of its competition.
